A student left an app store review admitting they weren’t reading their Bible, felt bad about it, and didn’t know where to start. Stan Williams, a strategist for teen spiritual formation who has worked with teenagers for at least a decade, treats that review as the real diagnosis. Many teenagers want to read Scripture. They stall for lack of a path and a reason to keep going. His response is to build that path inside the phone, where their attention already lives, and to give their reading a structure and a reward they can feel.
That answer runs against the usual adult complaint. It also has limits, and the limits matter as much as the strategy.
Where does the “lazy” diagnosis come from?
The familiar complaint goes like this: teenagers have the Book, they have the time, they spend hours on TikTok, so they must not care. It feels obvious because adults can see the screen time and cannot see the inner struggle.
Williams reads the same situation differently: “a lot of students want to do the right thing. They want to read their Bible, they just don’t have the structure to do it.”
The student in that review felt guilt. Guilt is evidence of caring. What the student lacked was an entry point. Williams adds a second pressure. The Bible is an ancient text, and teenagers hear constantly that it is old and no longer relevant. Put an unfamiliar book in front of a young person who has absorbed that message and has no plan for where to begin, and the likely result is paralysis. Laziness is the wrong word for it.
It helps to ask whose experience this describes. Williams speaks from his own Bible classes, the school attached to his church, years of youth ministry, and a year he spent at Princeton with about 22 youth leaders and strategists working on the biggest issues teenagers face. That is real exposure to young people. It is also one man’s vantage point, much of it from a church school where students already sit in Bible class every day. It makes the lazy diagnosis harder to assume. It does not prove that every teenager is quietly eager to read.
What changes if the problem is structure?
If the problem were desire, the adult’s job would be persuasion: repeat why the Bible matters and raise the stakes. Williams says that is mostly what he hears when he asks youth pastors how they track and motivate students’ reading. They tell students to do it and explain how important it is.
He thinks that answers the wrong question. In his words, “students need motivation. They need guidance.” He then imagines the teenager’s reply to the hundredth lecture on the value of Scripture: “Thank you for telling me why it’s valuable. Now show me how to do it.”
Adults tend to blend two separate things here. One is conviction about why reading matters. The other is a working habit of reading. Many teenagers already have some of the first and none of the second, and repeating the conviction leaves the habit exactly where it was.
Scripture pictures formation happening inside the rhythms of ordinary life. Moses tells Israel to keep God’s words in the routines of the household: “And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up” (Deuteronomy 6:7). This is covenant instruction to Israel, not a parenting technique. The pattern is still instructive. Teaching was meant to live in the actual structure of a day. Williams is asking what the structure of a teenager’s day looks like now, and much of it runs through a phone.
He also gives a reason to start early. “Holy habits are so important at a young age,” he says, because habits formed young shape the life that follows. Paul makes a related observation to Timothy: “from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 3:15). Early familiarity with the text guarantees nothing, but Scripture treats it as a real gift.
Why keep the phone?
Confiscation is the instinctive move. Remove the distraction and hope the good thing fills the gap. Williams pushes back, saying that taking the phone “is not always the best way to get students and teenagers in the word of God.” He admits it sounds counterproductive.
His alternative changes what the phone points toward. “I like to say we took dopamine and made it discipleship,” he says. The mechanics that keep a teenager scrolling, such as visible progress, streaks and friendly competition, get aimed at Bible reading. His app, spelled B-I-B-L-E-Z, offers reading plans, devotionals, trivia games and leaderboards, and pays students in a points currency they can spend on real gift cards.
He tells of a high schooler who said he had stayed up until three in the morning reading the Bible on the app, trying to read one more chapter than a friend from class. By Williams’s own count, his app’s analytics at one point showed 50 students who had not missed a day since downloading it. Those figures are his, from his own product, and nothing in the conversation checks them independently.
The core of his argument concerns time. Most apps compete to take a teenager’s attention. He wants to “reward their time rather than just taking their time.” And he insists on staying in their space: “They’re still on their phone, but we’re using the phone to disciple them.”
The cultural point underneath is sharper than the technical one. Adults often treat the phone as a foreign object intruding on a young person’s real life. For many teenagers it holds much of their social world and their sense of who they are. Taking it away does not move them into a quieter place. It risks making Scripture the thing that showed up when their world was taken.
Is rewarding Bible reading just bribery?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves full weight. If a teenager reads to earn a Chick-fil-A card, what has been formed: love for God’s Word, or love for the card? Will the habit outlast the rewards?
Williams answers with an observation from his Princeton year. Teenagers, he concluded, are not economically empowered. Most have no money and cannot get a real job yet. Adults find small rewards silly, he says, because “we think that way because we are economically empowered. We can just go buy it.” For someone with no income, a reward usable in real life weighs more than an adult guesses.
Lisa Fields connects this to a school reading program she remembers, where tracking enough books earned a free personal pan pizza. As an adult it seems absurd to read books for a pizza. It worked anyway. “You just needed that little incentive,” she says.
Williams is less reassuring on one point than he may intend. He says the app has an addictive quality, and the three-in-the-morning story cuts both ways. A teenager losing sleep to beat a classmate’s chapter count is reading Scripture, and is also being driven by the same competitive pull that drives other apps. Whether outside rewards grow into inner love for the text is a question this conversation cannot settle. By Williams’s account the app was only two or three weeks old at the time, and he said plainly, “we have to do more testing just to see what this will really do.”
He does describe design choices that push against pure bribery. The free version lets students read, track progress and do devotionals without the expensive rewards, and he says every student started there. Parent accounts let a parent see what a child is reading and tie an allowance to milestones they set. “If there’s no visibility, there’s no accountability,” he says. The reward is meant to sit inside relationships with parents, teachers and churches. It works as an on-ramp only if those adults stay involved once the teenager is reading.
What the KJV detail reveals
One finding cuts against a common assumption about Gen Z more sharply than any reward scheme. Asked which translation students choose most, Williams said the KJV, which surprised him, since he teaches from the ESV and other translations read more easily. He reports students saying they wanted the old language with a new voice reading it aloud.
The stereotype says young people want everything simplified. These students reached for the oldest English on the menu and asked only for a fresh way to hear it. In this case, at least, the distance between teenagers and Scripture had more to do with access and ownership than with the difficulty of the words.
Ownership surfaced again when Williams asked a class of about 30 students who used a Bible reading app. Two raised their hands. Those two used a well-known app he speaks of warmly, “but they didn’t feel like it was theirs.” It felt made for their parents. A tool handed down by adults tends to feel like an assignment. Williams’s own students helped shape his app over four years of development, telling him what was cool and what to drop, and he reports teenagers now asking their parents and churches to sign up. The influence runs upward from the students.
A missing structure, not only a missing habit
Fields widens the question so that it does not land on one generation. People say biblical literacy is low among the young, she notes, but literacy as a whole is low. Her logic is simple: “So if they’re not reading, they can’t read the Bible.” The claim about current literacy rates is hers and worth checking against data. The dependence she names holds either way. Reading Scripture requires reading.
She then points to something churches used to supply. Growing up, she and Williams both had Sunday school as a third space beside home and school, a place where they practiced reading comprehension by working through Scripture. Williams adds that if you go back far enough, many people learned to read by reading the Bible. Fields mentions church efforts that still do this work, such as an AND Campaign initiative in Atlanta that rallies churches from different political sides around helping third graders read.
This brings the argument back to structure. Sunday school was itself a structure: a fixed time, a group, a teacher, a text, week after week. Where it has faded, teenagers have lost more than an hour on Sunday morning. They have lost the scaffolding that once turned good intentions into practiced reading. That shifts some of the responsibility onto the adults and churches who let the scaffolding go. An app might carry part of that load. It cannot carry all of it.
Williams names the cost of the gap. He tells his students that their generation is susceptible to false doctrine and ideologies, and explains: “we’re accepting to this stuff because we do not know the truth.” Without working knowledge of Scripture, a young person has little to test new ideas against.
What makes it formation
The most revealing part of Williams’s account is a method that failed. For seven years he has read the Bible live online every morning, and at first he believed this was how to help his students. It didn’t stick. His explanation is candid: “Their attention is on you. It’s not necessarily on the Bible.” Sermons, podcasts and Christian content all have value, he says, “But their eyes need to be put on the word for themselves.”
That admission shows what the app is for and how to judge it. The aim is a young person reading the text directly, without a charismatic adult in the middle. As Williams puts it, “Once we shifted from diverting their attention away from bad stuff, we had to get their attention on the good stuff.”
He describes the result he hopes for as a renewed mind. Paul’s words are specific: “be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God” (Romans 12:2). Paul writes this to believers in Rome, urging them to offer their whole lives to God in response to his mercy. The renewing he describes is God’s work in a person given over to him. Points, streaks and dashboards can earn their place by putting the text in front of a teenager and keeping it there. The renewing is beyond any tool’s reach.